I played a woman's 50th birthday party out in the suburbs of NYC. Her husband booked me to provide music for them and about 40 of their friends, with my own equipment, singing and playing guitar, looper pedal setup, one man band style.

I booked it while I was on the West coast, so when I put it in my calendar I was careful to adjust the timezone. Only problem was I selected some South American city as my "time zone" on the calendar and that country didn't recognize daylight savings, and the gig was taking place after the clocks changed in the Fall. So, the start time on my calendar was an hour later than it was supposed to be.

I get to the party, what I think is in an hour early, and they're in full swing, but with no music. Awkward, but no one alerts me to anything. I talk with the husband and he says they'd like me to set up outside on their deck, where most of the guests are hanging out. There's a chance of rain, but nothing yet, so I say sure, and start slowly getting my equipment setup. About 45 minutes later the husband is visibly frustrated and asks me when I'm going to start playing. I tell him in about 15 minutes, and he again looks visibly frustrated but doesn't say anything. I finally ask him if there's a problem and he alerts me I was supposed to start almost an hour ago. I apologize profusely and quickly setup the rest of my stuff. I play the opening chords of my first song, and I feel a raindrop hit my head.

I mentally commit myself to continue unless it's unbearable, and I can see that the guests seem willing to put up with it for the moment, so I keep playing. I get through about 2 songs, and I look down and my EQ pedal lights are flickering on and off. My board is covered in water at this point. One of my pedals just stops working. I see that folks are moving everything inside, so I stop and tell the host I'll try to quickly move everything inside to continue playing. At this point, no one is helping me, so I have to breakdown all my equipment myself while the rain just keeps coming. My stuff got soaked. I've got a couple pedals which don't seem to be operational, so I take them off the board as I frantically try to get the rest of my stuff setup in their much smaller living room space.

As I'm getting everything setup inside, I meet the wife. She's red in the face, very drunk, and absolutely livid. She rips into me saying that her husband has paid me way too much money for me to show up late and play only a couple of songs. I try to explain that I'm setting up inside to play more for them, and that I'll happily stay later, but she doesn't want to hear it and tells me multiple times, loudly, that I've ruined her birthday. I am SO flustered at this point, I can barely remember how to plug in my equipment. One of their outlets isn't working, to make matters worse. I finally get everything setup inside, but about half of their guests have left at this point (mostly due to the rain, I think, and to the fact that the birthday gal is shitfaced).

I struggle through like 10 more songs, all the while overhearing the wife loudly crying to her friends about how I've ruined this. Everyone is just either staring at me and judging me in commiseration with the wife, or trying to comfort her. A couple people have song requests, but none that I could actually do.

I keep playing until the husband gives me the sign. I apologize profusely again, refuse to let him pay me the remainder, and breakdown my equipment faster than I think I ever have.

The answer is clearly both

Thanks!

Re: "why didn't the US just seek to destroy most of the Japanese Pacific fleet?" This begets one of the most controversial decisions in modern warfare - many people, if not most, still disagree on what the US should have done. So, can we form new norms, new morals for war after experiences like that? Isn't that why we talk and argue about them? I like to think we can. So, I tend to dispute the idea that when we're talking about WAR, morality, and norms, and expectations for proportionality are out the window. We could have dropped a nuke on Afghanistan and been done with it. But we didn't. One reason is because there were norms at play.

To say proportionality in a war makes zero sense is a normative statement. Even wars have norms. Is that "letting emotions take over reason"? There are many who disagree and have experience in wars like the ones we're talking about. I don't see that absent some modern moral philosophy, they'd be totally fine with genocide. That's saying a whole lot about the situation, and it sounds like projecting your own moral code onto it.

Yes, most of it ultimately got funneled to the wealthy through some of the means you're talking about, But specifically most of PPP was given to larger entities who qualified because of tricky language in the law.
Re: investments and skimping - again, not a Libertarian position. In a crisis like Covid, of course that money is going to go to profit - but only by the bigger companies that get most of it and don't need it.
As usal, the unseen, downstream costs are often the biggest (another Libertarian-ish take), ie. the number of small businesses that completely disappeared, severely downsized during covid (I had one), or weren't created in the first place. Most of those cannot be quantified. They weren't on the radar. Money to those businesses gets spent and goes to the wealthier. All of this would totally be agreed to by Libertarians.
And for the record, I'm not a Libertarian.

Lots of the covid money could absolutely be called a bailout, and the majority of it ended up with the wealthy. The lockdowns were also a MAJOR source of the gap. Both things that Libertarians wouldn't generally support. I don't see the evidence re: corporate tax rate. Poor people start corps too, and they do so more now. And businesses WILL invest profits into jobs, when there is actually a vibrant economy, competition, need for r&d, etc. We don't live in that world. We live in a corporatocracy, which again, isn't something generally supported by most Libertarians.

You don't have to like Libertarians, but at least choose the right target. They aren't the problem.

Big govt Reaganites aren't the same as Libertarians. Libertarians generally would have said NO to corporate bailouts.

I've seen that shift as well

I don't like when Moynihan's war mongering side comes out, and he's doing it with Gaza on this one. Like Kmele and Matt, I don't know where the line is as far as reasonable retribution when your enemy violates international and national agreements, but it's gotta be somewhere far short of killing every Gazan. That does rise to the level of "genocide" and apparently, for Moynihan, it's acceptable insofar as Hamas doesn't yield.

Meh, their hypothesis is misguided, but not incredibly wrong. There's a better-than-chance correlation between attractiveness and success in any industry, and it's definitely more so in showbiz.

Alliant doesn't offer business checking accounts

Agreed

Re: hearing more like that - that's where the algorithm comes in and for better or worse, Spotify has been very successful at bringing listeners music similar in certain ways to what they already like (but I don't think the classical music side of their algorithm is good at all). I appreciate your dedication to the quality of the music doing a lot of the work - people will try to beat that idealism out of you, and clearly many here are already trying to. Good music, in a more objective sense, can move people and that will have an effect on success. But in our current environment, that effect is small when you put it up against the power of marketing and cultural influence. You're right that it would need a sea change - a platform where artists are asked to NOT market their music and a music community that builds itself on somewhat radical ideas about sharing and promoting only the music they think is good, as opposed to what everyone else is also listening to. More food for thought: I love Nirvana, and I know a lot about that era of music. Though their start was very "grassroots," they absolutely marketed their music, and others did for them - if they hadn't been actively trying to get signed by Geffen due to marketing frustrations with sub pop, it's likely we never would have heard of them. And, something happened culturally at that time that no one, not even Kurt, could possibly have controlled, which was a growing counter cultural movement away from pop and hair metal. At that point, Nirvana would have become a successful act without the cultural influence, but they only became earth shattering because of the cultural part, IMO.

LOL, ego tripping... I would bet a whole lot of money that your "11 separate, highly successful projects that all started independently of each other" use similar, digital, modern production techniques catering to a mainstream audience. If that's what you want to call "good enough" that's fine, but then you aren't the kind of person the OP is concerned with and wouldn't be using his hypothetical platform anyway. So, stop bothering him.

You would have to market this as "the best" place to listen to "the best" music and be successful in doing so across much more than just musicians. Nothing brings a crowd quite like a crowd, as they say, and that's one variable I think you're missing in your thinking on this. No matter how much success folks have on the platform, if it doesn't translate into a broad reach with $ royalties attached, it's going to be an uphill battle the whole way. There are already a ton of musicians who have lots of respect and clout in their own communities, but whose music hasn't translated into broader success (I'm one of them). The problem to solve for those folks isn't the lack of another platform where folks can appreciate what they already appreciate about their music, it's the culture-shattering influence of such a platform on the broader music listening public that will translate into actual desire to listen to that artist's music again and again and again. You might wanna do a deep dive on modern classical music as a case study in this problem. Lots of incredible tradition, craft, experience (and ego to go along with it) in that world, and yet, classical music on the whole has been hitting its head up against this wall I'm describing for practically its entire existence. The masses don't listen to classical music (though they are starting to more, the numbers suggest), only serious musicians and niche fans do. Food for thought.

But, and I'm zooming out here a bit, the logic of what's "marketable" is always circular (aka "begging the question"). You're acknowledging that some music is marketable, and some isn't, but also that the key to success is marketing. Well, what if the music is unmarketable? What unidentified variables are making some music successful and some not? I would wager a lot of it has to do with the influence of gatekeepers in the first place. IMO, there's a lot of room for unmarketable music to be enjoyed by a wide audience, but if we always use the metric of past success to determine what's "marketable" we're missing a big part of the story. I agree that the OP might be guilty of some utopian thinking, and that few people are going to critically wade through infinite songs to find what they enjoy, but it seems so many of the replies here take for granted what makes music "marketable" in the first place, as if it doesn't have a whole lot to do with what has already been shoved down our throats for decades by gatekeepers and marketers.

She should have a contract where she makes this all clear. You shouldn't have let her not pay you for a gig. She's doing immature crap and that's a big red flag for the future. If she's an incredible singer and you enjoy playing with her, then fine. But it's not cool to steal money from your band and be unclear about how much anyone is getting paid because "rent." Gimme a break.

Curious about this! Did anyone express difficulty in obtaining the firearms and were any of them looking for a concealed carry permit, or are these just premises permits? My understanding is the premises permits were "technically" legal even before Bruen, but maybe the NYPD wasn't actually approving them? This is just a topic that interests me if you feel like saying more (I personally have never owned a gun and don't plan to, but I have always found NYC's stance on guns both legally indefensible if somewhat reasonable).

There are definitely acoustic and classical instruments on Reverb.

I'm always baffled when people make an argument like this and use the word "necessary." We're talking ad hoc economic decisions in very complicated and unregulated industries - there's nothing "necessary" about charging a vendor fee. If the promotor wanted to, he/she could absolutely let vendors sell their wares for free, and some do.

Exactly.

But no one took those hours from the artist but themselves. Spotify is literally taking royalties from some artists, and giving them to others.

I'm sure you mean well, but "it's just not worthy" is nonsense. There are tons of highly qualified, highly talented artists with esoteric styles that won't meet that threshold. They deserve to get paid for their plays, too.

Yes. You're being lied to. Imagine NYC in the mid 2000s. The MTA is probably 40% slower and dirtier. The cops are 90% more hands-off, which depending on your demographic, might be a good thing. But overall, I'd say the city is maybe 15% more dangerous than it was in the mid 2000s. Did you or any of your relatives travel here at any point in the 70s, 80s, or early 90s? Did they get mugged or killed? Cause that was WAY more dangerous than it is today.